Nicholas J. Meyler is general
manager of Wingate Dunross Inc., an executive
search firm in Agoura Hills, Calif., and president of its technology
unit.

The ME who just landed a new job
may have known more about electronics than the other candidates did.

Adaptability—that is, the
ability to keep up with the rapid pace of change—and practical skills rank high
with today’s employers. As always, it is vital that an engineer have depth of
understanding a specialty, but that has to be combined with a solid grounding in
a range of useful subjects.

Recruiters, including my
company, are finding that breadth of knowledge and experience trumps depth in
the form of over-specialization in engineering. In recruitment, this means
finding the engineer who fits a job opening “to a T.”

That’s how Nathan Clark,
engineering director at kVA in Macomb, Mich., looks at the breadth and depth of
skills needed by candidates for engineering jobs. As an automotive-oriented
consulting company, kVA focuses on
electromechanical systems, vehicle safety, and training managers to meet the
ISO 26262 standard, which addresses functional safety for automotive electrical
and electronic safety-related systems. The company is based in Greenville, S.C.

“For the vertical stem of the T, kVA seeks engineers with a depth of
knowledge in a particular discipline such as ME,” Clark said. “But they also
need a broad range of skills in other areas or disciplines—the horizontal
crossbar of the T. For MEs, this usually means electronics, or software
development, or modeling and simulation.” The best jobs “are won by candidates
who demonstrate a breadth of knowledge and experience in their own discipline
and the disciplines related to it.”

At one end of the range is
mechatronics. These electromechanical devices with sensors, power
sources, electronics, software, and control algorithms are the intelligence
embedded in nearly all new products. Employers look
for very specific sets of skills, experience, and training in these
disciplines.

At the other end of the range are a myriad of specialties. Some examples from
recent ME searches taken on by my company highlighted skills needed in quality
assurance, Six Sigma implementation, non-destructive testing, reliability analysis, and
stress/strain calculations. Each of these requires knowledge of statistics.

Searches for metallurgical
engineers usually ask for extensive ME skills in failure analysis, creep, stress,
strain, and similar physical properties. Thermal/mechanical skills are a plus,
especially in areas such as friction analysis,
lubricants, and thermal breakdown.

The bulk of W-D searches are in
areas like materials science, nanotechnology, electronics, fossil-fueled and
renewable energy, chemistry and chemical engineering, and dealing with
disruptive technologies in general. Strong skills in finite element analysis,
simulation, and optimization are invariably sought.

Whenever competitive forces gain
ascendancy over inertia, technology and product development get closer to the
“bleeding edges.” That is where engineers encounter the knottiest challenges
bound up with the biggest opportunities. Bleeding edges demand of MEs the ability to think of products as
completely integrated systems—including their production and the needs of all
who use or touch them.

This is best dealt
with by systems engineering, “which is the discipline that most closely aligns
with the T,” Clark at kVA said. “Systems engineers think holistically
about concept, design, development, production processes, and operations plus
risk management and sustainability—the entire product life cycle in all its
dimensions.”

According to Clark,
“Systems engineers are specialists in simplifying complexity, resolving
ambiguity, and focusing the creativity of others—but they are not generalists. Today’s
engineering students learn to define system boundaries, goals, and functions. They
also learn to anticipate failure modes, to plan for mitigation and recovery,
and to define and manage interfaces.”

In the process,
“they learn to translate the ‘languages’ spoken by the various disciplines that
are involved in every cross-functional project,” Clark added.

All too often
engineering specialists cannot understand one another, and the problem goes
much deeper than jargon and idiomatic expressions. Systems engineers’ skills
“are unmatched for removing organizational barriers, streamlining
communication, ridding it of ambiguities, and improving collaboration among
everyone while reducing wasted effort” such as rework.

Barton Foster of The Barton
Group, a recruiting firm in Livonia, Mich., noted that, “We find that MEs with no manufacturing experience don’t
really have the understanding of basic production processes that are required
for the best jobs that command the highest salaries.” As to the mix of skills
and capabilities for MEs, “there is no combination that's not in demand
somewhere.”

For the automotive industry, Foster said, “There are just not enough of these broad-gauge engineers
with multiple skill sets to go around. MEs with minimal experience outside
their discipline still command good salaries, however, because ME is
fundamental to so many other areas of engineering.” Foster said that experience
in manufacturing, electronics, or mechanical is always in demand.

Diversity in the workplace emerged
as a challenge and opportunity at Sequence Staffing, a staffing and recruitment
firm in Roseville, Calif. “As we look at our northern California markets,
diversity accounts for two huge trends in the engineering workplace,” said
Frank DeSafey, a Sequence Staffing principal.

“Perhaps uniquely in our time,
four generations of engineers are active,” he said. “This diversity in ages
presents huge opportunities for fresh, even unorthodox, thinking that
accommodates a variety of different societal viewpoints.” Secondly, diversity
is the norm worldwide in the skill sets and nationalities. “We get a lot of
requests from overseas firms looking for American-trained engineers and, vice
versa, from American firms looking for engineers trained elsewhere,” DeSafey
said.

“Diversity can be a challenge to
manage in the workplace, which drives the demand for MEs,” he noted. More than
engineers from other fields, MEs usually have good communications skills, the
ability to write clearly, a willingness to accept responsibility, and the basic skills to manage outside resources and
diversified teams, DeSafey said.

“This is why there is a
rising preference for MEs as generalists rather than
specialists,” he said. “We need ME applicants with proven flexibility in their
approaches to solving problems. They need to be able to demonstrate their
adaptability.”

Confronted with knowledge
explosions in every technical field, many engineering professors urge students
to “keep up” by delving deeper—taking in-depth extra courses—in their
specialties. Conversely, engineering students who have spent too many years solely
in academia are less desirable to many employers. Such students are seen as
lacking experience with deadlines, with the pressures of work, or with the need
to make a profitable product.

Industry and academia don’t
always like to talk about it, but the “half life” of knowledge is short. In
many fields, half of what engineers needed to know when they were hired may be
outdated or irrelevant in a few years.

Engineers with
multi-disciplinary skills are much more adaptable, and more in demand, but in
engineering there still are more specialists than generalists. Recruiters note
that people who are overly specialized in one area may find their skills become
obsolete. Successful engineers, they say, reinvent themselves continuously. “Yesterday’s
CAD/CAM whiz may turn into a vice president at an orthodontics software company
that relies on advanced modeling and imaging software,” one recruiter said.

The biggest challenge an
engineer has is anticipating the future to stay ahead of skills obsolescence. For
most engineers, the problem is finding the time to learn about innovations and
reinvent their careers. If they are working 50 hours a week and have a family,
it’s a difficult balancing act.

What is amazing, however, amid
the unceasing cross-pollination among engineering disciplines, is how
successful engineers are in moving from one field to another. These engineers
obviously need breadth of engineering exposure balanced with depth in a
specialized field.

The demands of today’s
competitive business environments tilt the balance toward breadth. As
technologies mature, the balance will tilt back toward depth. But this assumes
an end to disruptive technologies, which no one foresees.

Quick Facts:

Recruiting and
placement is an $11 billion business, of which more than a third is classified
as technical recruiting. Standard recruiting
fees are 30 percent of the first-year salary. For a high-profile CEO, fees may reach 50 percent, or
several million dollars.

Source: the
Association of Executive Search Consultants, New York.

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S I D E B A R #1

Power-Gen and the Boomers

Power generation companies are
looking at the prospect of a brain drain. Generally accepted data from the
Edison Electric Institute indicates that 45 percent of engineers now on the job
will be eligible to retire in five years.

If only half of them decide to
retire, that is almost a quarter of an experienced workforce.

“They are very worried about
losing the skills and experience of their Baby Boomers,” said Jay Rogers, vice
president of recruiting at Randstad Engineering. “They are hiring engineers
from other fields and retraining them, which is something new.”

Demand from power-generation
companies is a driver of the recruiting business for Randstad, based in
Atlanta. “In power gen, MEs are valued highly for their analytical skills,”
Rogers said. “MEs are needed to manage scheduled-maintenance outages and
restarts. Experience in commissioning new plants is a plus. So is knowledge of
heat transfer, thermal properties, and electrical transmission and distribution.”

The hardest ME spots to fill in
power generation are in nuclear, where Randstad fields very high demand from
prospective employers. One of Georgia’s big utility companies is building two
multibillion-dollar reactors. According to Rogers, skills most in demand are in
heat management; rotating equipment such as turbines, pumps, and generators; transmission
and distribution; and electrical and electronic systems.

Frank DeSafey at Sequence Staffing
in Roseville, Calif., however, is skeptical about some of the common
assumptions about the Baby Boomer retirements. “True, there simply are not
enough trained people to go around, hence the high demand from all market
sectors and disciplines,” he said. “But this demand is a very complicated
picture. You have to factor in the outsourcing of so much technical work, a
more independent young workforce wanting to work from home or wherever.”

According to DeSafey, “The picture
is further complicated by the Baby Boomers themselves. Their retirement plans
have been disrupted by the recession. When Boomers do retire, will they be
replaced one for one or in some very different ratio? No one knows.”

Note: Wingate Dunross, Inc.
is a Retained Executive Search Firm in Los Angeles which has been in operation
since 1983. The combined experience of the four principals spans a century of
dedicated commitment to the profession of recruiting and staffing. Nicholas Meyler
is a degreed Chemical Engineer and a graduate of Princeton's World-renowned
Philosophy Department. He enjoys fencing, chess, scuba, climbing, photography
and genealogy.